Facebook Friends

Even I’m on it. Of course I joined, like so many other people, to be involved with a specific event. Once the event was over, I was left with a Facebook account and a whole bunch of “event friends” that I wasn’t really sure I was interested in.

Perhaps I am not the typical Facebook user so let me tell you about my interaction with it. I use Facebook to keep in touch with acquaintances and certain groups to which I belong. Most of my closest friends are not on Facebook. A few close friends are but we don’t communicate through it. I keep my friend count under 50.

I regularly unfriend people.

Facebook, and social media in general, have changed a lot of things about how we interact with each other. But I refuse to let Facebook define what a friend is to me. Everybody “friends” everybody on Facebook without really thinking about what friendship means because that’s just what we do. Friendship to me is about having a relationship with another person, one that transcends learning about him/her through newsfeeds, status updates, wall postings and images. In other words, something more substantial than a “Facebook friend”.

Facebook makes it unappealing to ditch the dead weight among our “friends” because they use such a loaded word to perform the action: UNFRIEND. I do it, but only to people that I don’t have a relationship with. In my mind it’s like getting rid of clutter.